Variant of Zena from Greek 'xenia' meaning 'hospitality,' or Arabic 'zina' meaning 'beauty.'
Zeena arrives from multiple directions. Its most likely root is Arabic *zina* or *zeina*, from a root meaning beauty, adornment, or ornament — a name that captures not just the fact of beauty but the active, intentional quality of making beautiful. It appears across the Arabic-speaking world and in Persian-influenced cultures as a feminine name of considerable grace.
A separate Greek thread connects it to Xena, ultimately rooted in *xenos*, meaning guest or stranger — which gives it an interestingly contradictory character: inward beauty versus outward foreignness. In American literary history, the name carries the weight of Edith Wharton's 1911 novella *Ethan Frome*, where Zenobia — called Zeena — is the sickly, sharp-tongued wife whose illness and emotional frigidity trap the protagonist in rural New England misery. Wharton's Zeena is a masterpiece of psychological portraiture, a woman whose suffering is real even as her manipulations are suffocating, and the name has lived in that ambiguous shadow ever since in the English literary tradition.
Contemporary parents choosing Zeena are more likely drawing on the Arabic lineage, drawn to its exotic fluency and its core meaning of adornment. The double-e spelling creates a visual warmth and distinctness that separates it from the harder Xena — associated with the television warrior princess — softening it without sacrificing its edge. It is a name that rewards looking up, one that carries far more history than its two syllables initially suggest.